We, the people, need to make sure that this awakening of "new politics" doesn't end up like the last. First, you have a visionary rhetoric of renewal and "power to the people", spinmeister-crafted to win an election. A fresh face in 10 Downing Street, a new dawn. Bliss was it on that 1 May 1997 to be alive. Then the long, slow disappointment, as the new masters behave like the old, ­exploiting all the powers and privileges of an overmighty executive in an overcentralised state.

It's good that our political leaders are now falling over each other to offer radical proposals for reforming our political system. But remember that till just the day before yesterday David Cameron's Conservatives were totally focused on winning power by neo-Blairite means. The car didn't change, just the driver.

If this great reform is to be real and durable, we need to pin our politicians down. That means, at the end of the day, a written constitution.

In our parliamentary democracy, the path to this very British revolution goes through parliament. So we, the voters, need to confront a new generation of candidates for parliament with a set of constitutional demands. And we need to compose our checklists fast. Especially if Labour topples Gordon Brown after the local and European elections, and goes for a general election later this year under a new leader – the campaign will be upon us before you can say Alan Johnson. Obviously, the changes themselves will take longer. In sum, this is probably a two-term project; but it is not too soon to demand commitments.

Below is my first stab at a personal list for my candidates in Oxford West and Abingdon. I write this as a citizen, not a constitutional expert, and welcome ­corrections and suggestions. There are certainly important points I have left off, and others should be sharpened. Maybe some civic initiatives and groups, ­online and off, can start consolidating their demands, but there's no reason why we should all have identical lists. If enough of the people, enough of the time, keep hammering away at their would-be representatives on a similar range of issues, the message will get through.

1 Electoral reform: We need more representative representatives. So far as I can see, the most realistic proposal comes from the commission led by the late Roy Jenkins, whose advice this government solicited and then proceeded to ignore. Will you, Mr or Ms candidate, commit to this now?

2 Fixed terms: Will you commit to supporting fixed-term parliaments? To allow governments to implement serious reforms, I suggest a term of five years. Of course, there would have to be special provisions for parliament itself to initiate early elections if the business of government is deadlocked, or in other carefully specified circumstances. And why not limit an individual prime minister to a maximum of two terms? If that provision is good enough for the US president, and even the Chinese Communist party has adopted it, it should be good enough for us. Just look back at the third terms of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to see the danger. As the students chanted in Paris in 1968: Dix ans, ça suffit!

3 Strong independent parliamentary committees: A glory of the American system, our parliament has gone some way to developing such committees over the last 20 years. Their hearings and reports are among the better checks we have on our overmighty executive. Independently elected chairs and stronger powers of subpoena would enhance their important role.

4 Better-paid, full-time MPs: I think our MPs should be better paid, as they are in most comparable advanced democracies, with allowances that don't require them to fiddle their expenses. In return, they should treat this as a full-time job, with only minimal and strictly non-­conflicting outside work. Then we may hope for honourable members again.

5 Reform the House of Lords: In the way it is currently composed, our second chamber is the most ludicrous constitutional dog's dinner — yet these unelec­ted peers have in recent years been among the most important guardians of our liberties. The Lords is a nonsense that regularly talks very good sense. I don't think we should go for an elected chamber in which the party politics of the Commons would simply be reproduced in crimson and ermine. We can't have US-style senators because we don't have US-style states. Better ideas please.

6 Stronger democratic local ­government: As I travel round the rest of Europe and North America, I find the strength of local government there contrasts painfully with its emasculation here. Overcentralisation is a bane of the British state. Strange though this may sound, we need a thousand more Borises.

7 A bill of rights: An explicit codification of our rights need not entail (as the ­Conservatives propose) a repeal of the Human Rights Act, which is one of the good things Labour has done. Nor should we get lost in a futile debate between defenders of the universal rights of every­one living in Britain and those who prefer to speak of the traditional liberties of the British. Defenders of rights and liberties belong on the same side.

8 Roll back the database state: I'm glad to see Cameron point to the megalomaniac national identity register scheme as evidence of "an increasingly Orwellian surveillance state". But we need a set of specific commitments on issues ranging from ID cards through email snooping to the elephantine DNA database, with deadlines for action. To reverse the now legally entrenched intrusive practices of the Home Office, the police and the secret services is a Herculean task.

9 Give us our first amendment: We can no longer take the freedom of expression and religion for granted in Britain. It is being eroded from several sides. It now needs an explicit constitutional anchor, as in the US.

10 Set course for a written constitution: Our current constitution is not really "unwritten"; it is just written down in a hundred bits and pieces, held together by yellowing sticky tape and the glue of convention. (For an up-to-date guide, see Vernon Bogdanor's forthcoming The New British Constitution.) Having it pulled together into a single portable piece of lucid, muscular prose, with the implicit made explicit, and omissions and internal contradictions resolved by reform, would be a great step forward.

I have before me two pocket-size booklets, one crimson, one white. They contain two of the finest political texts in today's world: the constitutions of the United States of America and of the Federal Republic of Germany. Having lived in both countries, I know what a difference it makes that people can carry their constitution around in their back pockets, learn passages by heart, and refer to it whenever they are confronted by the state. Why should we not have that chance here? At the same time as electing the next but one parliament, probably in 2014 or 2015, I want to vote in a referendum on the new British constitution. Then, and only then, will we know that something has changed for good.